2022 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 4(2) Despite the complexity of statelessness, theorists have not yet worked out a formal typology.3 When conceptualising statelessness in singular terms, they miss something important:4 they fail to capture the full moral scope of statelessness. The article addresses this shortcoming. It is divided into four parts. In the first part, I will show how statelessness is categorised under the UN’s current framework. In the second part, I will turn to legal and social theory to argue that statelessness can be best understood through the two concepts of responsibility and recognition. In the third part, I will identify three different subtypes of statelessness. They derive from the source of nationality deprivation and include voluntary statelessness, structural statelessness and denigrative statelessness. Finally, I will offer some concluding remarks. Before identifying the three subtypes, I must make two points about the following arguments. First, the article is mostly concerned with individual statelessness. I define individual statelessness in contradistinction to collective statelessness. ‘Collective statelessness’ describes statelessness as experienced by entire collectives, such as Palestinians, Kurds or the Rohingya, with a shared history of denationalisation, whereas ‘individual statelessness’ describes statelessness as experienced by individuals, such as Garry Davis, Friedrich Nottebohm or Shamima Begum, who will be introduced in the third Part of the article. While a Palestinian person can be considered both individually as well as collectively stateless, not every stateless individual suffers from collective statelessness. Garry Davis, for instance, did not belong to any collective with a shared history of denationalisation. Second, the force of my argument depends largely on the quality of the examples that I have chosen. Throughout the article, I have relied on few examples with a rich amount of qualitative data. Yet this has come with a limitation: the case studies of stateless individuals are mostly drawn from a small number of countries with relatively few cases of statelessness. For example, take the case of Shamima Begum. The Statelessness Index reported that there were 5,236 applications for the statelessness determination procedure in the United Kingdom between April 2013 and September 2019. Even under such conservative estimations, this is low when compared with countries like India or Myanmar, where a great number of Muslims have been deprived of their nationality. Although the situations of former British national Shamima Begum and Jamalida Begum, a stateless Rohingya woman, are in many ways similar, due to these differences in their countries of origin, I avoid identifying and relying on this parallel.5 The formal typology that I have developed here should be seen as a hypothesis itself. Rather than offering a final answer to what statelessness is, I hope that my research will help others to ask the question more precisely in the future. 3 4 5 Brad Blitz has developed a typology of the causes of statelessness but not of statelessness itself: see Brad Blitz, ‘Statelessness, Protection and Equality’ (Policy Brief, Refugee Studies Centre, 2009). Jay Milbrandt, ‘Stateless’ (Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2012/6, Pepperdine University, 2012) 1. Scholars seem to generalise the stateless commonly as the ‘most vulnerable [people] in our world’: see also Indira Goris, Julia Harrington and Sebastian Köhn, ‘Statelessness: What It Is and Why It Matters’ [2009] 32 Forced Migration Review 4, 4. See ‘Jamalida Begum — Rohingya Survivor Escapes Horror’, Geneva International Centre for Justice (Blog Post, 21 February 2017) <https://www.gicj.org/lest-we-forget/887-jamalidabegum-rohingya-survivor-escapes-horror>, archived at <https://perma.cc/5HTP-9JHU>. 238